Sunday, October 6, 2013

October 5th: Early this morning, we headed out of the apartment and up to Post to visit our student/soldiers. We have a list of those among all our soldier who we need to see that morning. Usually it is those who we have not seen for a while. So this morning we started out with the hope to see several soldiers and since it is General Conference Sunday we were not going to go back home, so we had all the time we needed. We were able to visit with most of everyone we wanted to see. We found one young man who had broken his shoulder playing some volley ball, his story sounded really bad. After working through nearly the entire Brigade, we stopped off at the Friendship Chapel to see how things were progressing for the Spiritual Fitness BBQ that the protestant chapel puts on every 6 months. Sister Gowans went in to help with the set up and Elder Gowans felt impressed to go across the street to the last company we hadn't visited to look for one more young man. As he was walking through the area, a young soldier calls out to him, "Hello Elder". Usually when that happens he knows it is a member or else someone very familiar with the church. So he walked over to meet the young man and seeing his name tag asks, "Are you Brother King?" he said he was, but that he was not active in the church. They had a nice visit together, Elder Gowans encouraged the young man to read his scriptures and to pray daily. If he hadn't of gone over at that time, who knows if or when we would have ever met this nice young man. After the first session of conference ended, he felt prompted to return to the same unit to look for one other young man. He walked over and found him out in front of the barracks; he learned that his unit of assignment had been changed; he was now going to be in a support role for the special forces and so he was working on getting ready to pass their rigorous physical fitness test; we had a nice visit, Elder Gowans invited him to conference and then said our goodbyes.

We enjoyed the day of conference; we had several soldiers come out off and on during the day as they could and enjoy the sessions. The Spiritual Fitness BBQ was enjoyable, we had a good turnout of LDS soldiers who came out to support the function.